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  • From: Jason Flatt <jflatt AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] website
  • Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:13:06 -0700

On Thursday 19 October 2006 07:31, Jeremy Blosser wrote:
> On Oct 19, David Kowis [dkowis AT shlrm.org] wrote:
> > Pieter Lenaerts wrote:
> > > hi all,
> > >
> > > I know I missed all stuff on irc about this, but I can't help that I
> > > want to know what's going on.
> > >
> > > 1. What happened to our website?


What happened is a bit of a freak occurrence, and I cannot even find a reason
for it happening. It seems that the anonymous user was deleted from the
database. Since there is no way that I know of to delete that user from the
Web interface, it would have had to have been done at the database level. It
is possible that the cron update might have triggered it, but that seems
extremely unlikely.


> > Something happened to the internals of drupal. Oadaeh is working on it,
> > but he's a busy person.
> >
> > > 2. What is being done about it or what are we planning to do about it?
> >
> > Well, we could bring up the topic of moving away from drupal. I don't
> > think it's turned out to be as useful as we'd thought. We could simply
> > use the locking feature of MoinMoin and just use that as our site. It'd
> > need to be cleaned up a bit, but that's possible.
> > Also, some people actually do use those forum things. I don't know
> > what's wrong with them either...


Since there is quite a bit of discussion here and on IRC about this
currently,
I would like to take this opportunity to point out a couple of things.

First, no matter what software is chosen, there will always be the potential
for something breaking and that aspect of the site being unavailable. If you
want as simple as possible with as little chance for breakage as possible,
then you need to go back to a straight HTML site, but then you lose the
advantages gained by using software. Also, you would still need multiple
people available for updates, possibly more so, given the static nature of a
straight HTML site. Even MoinMoin has the possibility of breaking and
requiring someone with knowledge of it and/or Python to fix it. How many
people do we have available who knows that software?

Second, I didn't say I was going away, I just said I thought I was too busy
to
be in charge of the Tome team. I think my lack of activity for the past
several months is a testament to that. I don't have a problem staying on the
team and helping where possible, both w/documentation and Web site
maintenance. I'm just not sure I should be the leader. In retrospect, it
seems that most (all?) of the leads have been less available than previously,
so it may not matter if I stay as lead or not, but I'll leave that to the
community.


> Given that Jason's had to step down as Tome Lead due to time commitments we
> definitely need to either have someone else step up and get familiar enough
> with Drupal or find something else. It's a very Bad Idea for us to run a
> web front end package without an administrator, for security reasons if
> nothing else.
>
> Note, there's nothing that says the Tome Lead has to be the web app admin,
> and that's not what I'm saying... the Tome Lead's primary role is
> documentation, nothing else. It was convenient that Jason could just
> manage the entire site as well but it's not actually part of his job
> description. But if he doesn't have time for the Tome Lead functions he
> obviously doesn't have time for administering Drupal either (as the length
> of this outage shows).
>
> No offense is intended to Jason of course, he's done all he can during this
> outage to make time to work on it and it looks like he may have it working
> again now, stay tuned....

--
Jason Flatt
Source Mage GNU/Linux: Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic.
http://www.sourcemage.org/

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